Tropic Thunder

I Don't See Any Method At All

2008 // USA - Germany // Ben Stiller // September 12, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Hollywood is a tempting target for satire. The angles of attack are multitude: the self-importance, the artificiality, the artlessness, the clueless insularity, the inhuman ruthlessness. Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder tackles them all. It pounces with slavering gusto on every opportunity for vicious mockery, strafing Tinseltown with both barrels. It's definitely funny, but not the sort of comedy that had me laughing beginning to end. Instead it inspired a state of disbelief, gaping amusement, and squirming embarrassment. In its best moments, Thunder calls to mind the lunatic highs of Mel Brook's oeuvre. That said, the film is far too conventional in some respects, and too sublimely bizarre in others to be mistaken for any kind of comic masterwork. Yet despite some misfires in the performances and script, the sheer chutzpah of the enterprise and Stiller's unexpected flashes of comic madness render it a thing to behold. Neither mercy nor tact are in its arsenal, and thank God for that.

Stiller and co-writers Justin "This Is the Girl" Theroux and Etan Cohen open Tropic Thunder with an inspired and cunning sequence, using commercials and trailers to introduce the main characters. Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a hip-hop artist who has made a fortune peddling his own brand of energy drinks and bars. Lowbrow physical comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is starring in a sequel to his flatulence-rich gross-out hit, The Fatties. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.) is an award-showered Aussie Method actor appearing in a prestige drama about homosexual priests. And finally Tugg Speedman (a well-muscled and -oiled Stiller) is launching the latest sequel in his apocalyptic action franchise, Scorcher VI.

These fake ads set the refreshingly original tone for the rest of the film. Thunder doesn't occupy itself with wisecracks or dry observations. Rather, it replicates the ludicrous qualities of the real world and adds half a twist of bonus stupidity. We're prompted to loathe the characters of Thunder based solely on small glimpses of their output. However, the ads are also aimed squarely at the audience's own pop cultural preferences. The satire doesn't truly sting unless you've paid good money to see similar garbage. It's a risky tactic; no one likes to be called an idiot, even by implication. Stiller keeps us on his side by conveying a sense of shared misery. The director, after all, has produced his share of crap, as have his performers. In keeping with Thunder's Vietnam War film-within-the-film, Stiller establishes a bitter camaraderie with his audience, capped with a sheepish grin: "Can you believe we made it through nightmares like If Lucy Fell and Mystery Men?"

Thunder's plot is the stuff of numerous screwball comedies-of-error, albeit ratcheted up with admirably realized corporate movie-making freneticism and dollops of pure weirdness. The aforementioned film-within-the-film, also titled Tropic Thunder, is a Very Serious War Picture. Shooting on location in Vietnam, the production is rapidly spiraling out of control. Over budget and behind schedule, novice director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is out of his league juggling his stars' inflated egos and demands. Black is a barely controllable heroin addict. Stiller is trying to leap out of his action flick rut, having failed with a disastrous bit of Oscar-bait titled Simple Jack. (His mistake? Like Sean Penn in I Am Sam, he went "full retard.") Downey has medically darkened his skin to play the film's black sergeant, much to Jackson's consternation, and refuses to break character at any time. Hovering over Coogan's shoulder via satellite is monstrous producer Les Grossman (a hirsute, balding Tom Cruise), who breathes in air and exhales venomous insults and violent threats.

Lurking around the set is Four-Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte, grizzled and hook-handed), whose war memoir, also titled Tropic Thunder, serves as the basis for the film. Nolte recommends that Coogan break the actors out of their comfort zones by putting them "in the shit," as the vets say. The director eagerly pursues this notion, dropping his pampered cast in the jungle and resolving to shoot the rest of the film "guerrilla style" with minimal crew. Things go off the rails almost instantly, with Stiller and his fellow actors blundering into the clutches of opium growers. Suffice to say that the story functions mostly to establish that Stiller and company are complete fools, although—since this isn't completely pitch black comedy—their foolishness arguably saves them by the end.

Tropic Thunder isn't particularly funny or insightful when it relies on one-note gags or hackneyed reversals of expectations. You know the drill. The devoted Method thespian is in the throes of an identity crisis. The hip-hop star with the ultra-heterosexual partier persona is actually a sensitive gay wannabe actor. You can practically hear Stiller and Theroux tittering: We can gets some gags out of that, right? For all of Stiller's enviable precision when he aims at the institutional absurdities of Hollywood, there are still some unfortunate miscalculations. Cruise's producer is exquisitely malevolent, and he chews on the vulgarity with roaring relish. (I could have listened to him berate his underlings all night.) Yet Stiller seems to think that a puffy Cruise dancing to hip-hop is hilarious, when in reality it's just odd. The worst offender is Black, who is sadly miscast and grating. His manic "Cuckoo for Smack" routine lacks the wounded adolescent strut that made The School of Rock and Kung Fu Panda such delights, and all that's left is a bug-eyed caricature of addiction.

When Tropic Thunder succeeds, however, it succeeds marvelously. Satirizing the film industry is its primary mission, and in this it is absolutely savage. No one escapes its wrath: actors, directors, producers, writers, agents, or assistants. Even the pyrotechnics technician is portrayed as a clown. Most importantly, Stiller gets both the broad strokes and the details exactly right. Consider the portrayal of Stiller's agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey). There's the slick, unimaginative nicknames he spouts ("Tuggster!"); the way he proudly relishes his client's panda-rescue charity ad in Vanity Fair (back cover!); the fact that he plays Wii Tennis while talking on his Bluetooth headset, for Chrissake. It's ludicrous, but also creepily plausible. Thunder exhibits the sort of meticulous, dead-on writing and production design that betrays both an affection and a burning hatred for Hollywood.

Thunder also features glimmers of unexpected goofiness that borders on inspired lunacy. Indeed, it's the little things from this film that stick with me and bring a smile to my face, and most of these moments involve Stiller. I've never had any particular affection for him as a comedic actor, and here he spends too much screen time mired in a fruitless, Martin Sheen send-up. Yet I can't deny the dabs of crackpot strangeness that he adds to the film. Lost in the jungle with only his video iPod, he raptly watches Captain Kirk tussle with a rubber-suited alien. A lesser comedy would have harped on his affection for Star Trek in the script; instead Stiller slides in this revealing character detail via a sight gag. There's the shock and then hilarious horror when an animal attack has an unthinkable outcome. There's the wide-eyed way he murmurs the line, "You've got the VHS?" And there's the utterly demented sight of a baby repeatedly stabbing Stiller in the back with a knife. The moment is a personal favorite from the film, one that illustrates just how wonderfully nasty and unexpected Tropic Thunder can be. Consider yourself advised, soldier.

Frozen River

Northeast Passage

2008 // USA // Courtney Hunt // September 2, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Frozen River is a tale of dreams, or at least what passes for dreams in the bitter winters of far-upstate New York. The film presents us with two women, each a quintessential American survivor in their way. Ray (Melissa Leo) is a white, middle-aged single mom, scraping together a life for her two boys in a cramped manufactured home. Lila (Misty Upham) is a younger Mohawk woman, and also a mother, although her infant son has been wrested from her with the tacit consent of her tribe. When fate brings these two women together, their antagonism seethes, but eventually they embark on a perilous criminal collaboration. First-time director Courtney Hunt's naturalistic story of slush-and-mud desperation on the margins of the American dream is an affecting and uncommonly sensitive depiction of foolish risks taken for all the right reasons.

When Frozen River opens, Ray's husband has recently vanished with the funds that were supposed to secure their new double-wide. Eventually we learn that he is a gambling addict who has pulled such disappearing acts before. This might be the final act. Ray repeatedly checks her phone messages in search of some sign from him. The absent man of the house is often the subject of arguments between Ray and her teenage son T.J. (Charlie McDermott), their quarrels masking a shared understanding that he was a lousy husband and father. With Ray's job in a sad little retail store as the only source of income, the family is teetering on the edge of poverty. The dream of the double-wide is evaporating, the repo men are coming for the television, and meals before paydays consist of popcorn and Tang.

Ray eventually finds her husband's car; the husband is gone, but Lila is behind the wheel. The Mohawk woman is reticent, unwilling to explain herself: "I found it," she shrugs, "The keys were in it." A widow who works in the tribe's dingy bingo parlor, Lila has bad eyesight, a freezing little trailer—Ray's house is extravagant by comparison—and a son who seems to have been kidnapped by her mother-in-law. ("Tribal police don't get involved in that stuff," she explains.) She is also an aspiring smuggler of human cargo: Asian immigrants who seek to enter the U.S. from Canada. The Mohawk reservation straddles the border, rendering it an ideal conduit for trafficking when the river freezes. Unfortunately, Lila lacks a car with a spacious trunk, as well as the skin color that would permit her to pass the state troopers unmolested. As it happens, Ray needs cash for a down payment on the new house, a tantalizing prize that represents a better life for her family. The two work out an arrangement; Ray provides the transportation, Lila the connection. From the beginning, however it's an alliance fraught with tension and calamity. More than that I won't say.

Frozen River possesses a suffocating realism, a sensation partly established by its dismal landscape of white snow, slate sky, and rusting metal. Mostly, however, it emerges from Hunt's deep adoration for Leo and Upham's faces, which she frequently shoots in tight close-ups. Leo's outstanding performance resides deep in her eyes, lined with crow's feet and dollar-store mascara. They glint with the same contradictory hues that were in evidence in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada: despair, warmth, exhaustion, bitterness, and strutting decisiveness. It's such an authentic performance, it almost feel voyeuristic to watch her doing mundane things like preparing for work or broodingly smoking a cigarette.

Upham's smooth, cherubic face is more inscrutable, but her eyes have a squinting moistness that hints at her painful past and frayed sense of self. She doesn't make excuses for her misdeeds, and yet she seems acutely aware of how shabby and sad her life must seem. Many in the tribe treat her with contempt, as though she were some sort of untouchable, and not merely because her illicit side business is an open secret. (A native used car dealer refuses to sell her a vehicle with a trunk; he knows what use she has for it.) There seems to be ugly history there that is never revealed. Lila appears prepared to turn her back on the reservation, but her son keeps her there. She watches him from a distance and sneaks him money in potato chip cans.

Both Lila and Ray exhibit different kinds of defiance: the native woman a quiet apathy and intensely lonely longing; the white woman a scrabbling desperation and sarcastic tongue. Both of these people flare to life when out on smuggling runs. They become bolder and tougher, crackling with wariness. Both are in denial about what they are up to. Ray insists that she is "no criminal." Lila declares that their little enterprise isn't a crime at all, just "free trade between free people." And we believe them, in a way. Smuggling isn't a lifestyle or a thrill for these women, but a means to realize their dreams, no matter how small or simple they might seem to an outsider.

Implausibilities are scattered through Frozen River, mostly in the form of character reversals that don't ring quite true. While the film boasts an icy, anguished sense of lurking doom, it also suffers from a kind of lazy tidiness. Ray emphatically warns T.J. not to tinker with a propane torch, so of course he disobeys—for all the right reasons—and ignites a near-catastrophe. Of course the state trooper that sets Ray on edge at the store turns up later to question her, and of course this is the same trooper that pursues her during a botched smuggling run. Hunt's tone suggests that something momentous, even disastrous, will happen before the credits roll, but her storytelling style leaves little doubt that all will be resolved, one way or another. The suspicious smoothness in its narrative cogs notwithstanding, Frozen River's conclusion is touched with grace and fragile promise. The film's final scene involves a carousel, a family, and a glimmer of hope. Or at least what passes for such things in America.

Transsiberian

They Caught a Bad, Bad Train

2008 // UK - Germany - Spain - Lithuania // Brad Anderson // August 31, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - Allow me to clear up one thing that the marketing of Transsiberian has unforgivably muddled: Woody Harrelson might have first billing, but Emily Mortimer is the clear protagonist and the star of this serviceable—albeit raw-nerved—thriller. Director Brad Anderson begins with a meaty premise: two guileless Americans find themselves enmeshed in a heroin trafficking plot during their journey aboard the titular train. This is not a Locked Room mystery in the tradition of Murder of the Orient Express. Jessie (Mortimer) and Roy (Harrelson) spend as much time off the train as on it, and the film clearly owes a debt to Hitchcock's more harried, dashing thrillers in its action set pieces and its fascination with Jessie's responses to desperate, often uncanny, circumstances. Unfortunately, Anderson lends barely any thematic heft to the tale. While Jessie's plight often has us sweating bullets in the moment, Transsiberian's themes are confused, when the film-makers bother to articulate them at all. The result is a film that offers excitement and opportunities for "What Would You Do?" speculation, but little else.

In a era when thrillers so often rely on characters that are not what they seem, Transsiberian is bracingly straightforward in setting up its conflicts and twists. If you've seen the trailer, you already know the nickel version. Roy and Jessie are making an adventure of their return from a missionary trip in China by taking a train to Moscow. Roy is a good-natured but clueless schmuck, a variation on the bartender that established Harrelson's career, only without the sheepish humor. Jessie is the anxious dreamer, but with a wild past and a schizophrenic demeanor that permits Mortimer--who was all rural Minnesota sweetness in Lars and the Real Girl--to play against type a little. Sharing the couple's sleeping car is a pair far more acclimated to the perils of third-class world travel. Carlos (Eduardo Noriega) is a smooth Spanish bullshitter with an unseemly eye for Jessie, while Abby (Kate Mara) is an American girl from the wrong side of the tracks, all heavy eyeliner and furtive glances. The wild card is Grinko (Ben Kingsley), a dour Russian narcotics officer who is both maddeningly cunning and blatantly corrupt.

The plot is Transsiberian's raison d'être, so I won't say much more about it. There are harrowing acts of violence, a suitcase full of heroin that doesn't look like heroin, and lots and lots of deception and track-covering, particularly on Mortimer's part. Anderson's story and construction aren't stunningly original, but neither are they distractingly clichéd. The film borrows snippets from familiar thriller scenarios, cobbling them together into an contraption engineered to evoke cold-sweat tension. Guilt and suspicion are the currency of the script by Anderson and Will Conroy, and also the cornerstones of the film's most effective scenes. One of the more chilling moments involves a character browsing through pictures on a digital camera, where one particular image lurks like a tell-tale heart.

Harrelson is utterly and deliberately off-putting as Roy, an aw-shucks dimwit whose determination to do the right thing doesn't mitigate his jerk streak or his obliviousness to his spouse. (More than once, Mortimer pops in, panting and tearful, and Harrelson wonders, "Is something wrong?") Harrelson is actually a comfortable fit for the character, and does a passable job with the portrayal. However, the film has no use for him other than as ballast and to provide manly decisiveness at a couple of key moments. (Sexism much?) It's Mortimer's burden to hold our attention, and that she does quite well. She presents Jessie as a woman mired in a furrowed adolescent aimlessness after years of risky living. Her actions seem a little bewildering at times, but they're ultimately reconcilable with her twinned personality, part reckless ferocity and part impotent despair. The duller examples of the thriller genre depend on characters that behave in a relentlessly stupid manner. In contrast, Transsiberian's events tighten with exhausting tension around Mortimer due to to a couple of stupid mistakes. No honest person would deny suffering similar (or worse) lapses in judgment. Kingsley's Detective Grinko echoes the sly, relentless qualities of an older stripe of American gumshoe, even as he embodies a distinct post-Soviet gangster-cop archetype. It's a performance delivered from a hammy, eminently watchable stance, which serves Transsiberian's need for a menacing villain nicely.

Which brings us to the film's primary flaw: the sheer functionality of the whole enterprise. The film is exactly what it appears to be, no more, no less. Dark, violent, and ultimately forgettable, it's the stuff of enjoyable entertainment, but not necessarily stirring cinema. That's not to say that Transsiberian feels tossed-off, at least as a thriller. Its hunger for squirming viewers is palpable, and Anderson realizes the genre's components with a enviable skill and ruthlessness. In contrast, the director tends to lose his way when he gestures hazily towards themes such as the persistence of personal demons and the limits of compassion. These currents are presented with a kind of dreary half-heartedness. Furthermore, there's a muddled quality to the film's moral conception of Jessie: Is her subsumed assertiveness responsible for her plight, or is it the only thing that saves her hash? With one hand Anderson despairs over the unforeseen costs of deception, and with the other he promotes the virtues of noble lies. Transsiberian would have been better if it eschewed the awkward, mushy moral lessons and maintained a sharp focus on its principal strength. Namely, its visceral portrayal of a woman's grueling crawl through a waking nightmare.

The Edge of Heaven

The Greatest of These Is Love

2007 // Germany - Turkey - Italy // Fatih Akin // August 30, 2008 // Theatrical Print

A - With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin's Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile humanity. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim—and at times bitterly amused—sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.

Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a Turkish widower dwelling in Germany, where he spends his days watering his tomato plants in between drinking too much, gambling too much, and visiting Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute of the same Anatolian origin. Ali and his adult son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who teaches German at the local university, have an affectionate but taciturn relationship. They enjoy each other's company, but have little to discuss and less in common. Yeter, meanwhile, has a daughter in Turkey that she supports, a student who does not know her mother's real profession. Perhaps wishing to hold the loneliness of his remaining years at bay, Ali offers to pay Yeter the same rate as her brothel if she will live with him as a kept whore. For pragmatic yet proud Yeter, it's a more temping proposition than it sounds, partly due to the menacing Muslim fanatics that have been harassing her of late. Naturally, there are complications and crises, the nature of which you will need to experience for yourself.

After a time, the film departs Ali's tale to rendezvous with Yeter's daughter, Ayten (the gorgeous Nurgül Yesilçay). Pursued by the Turkish police for her participation in a radical communist street protest that turned violent, Ayten travels to Germany with false papers. She has a fiery temper and a longing to see her mother, which contribute to her falling out with her revolutionary comrades. She crashes on a university campus, with its cheap food and abundant spots for a homeless fugitive to sleep. When she begs linguistics student Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) for money, the German woman offers a meal and a kind ear. Intrigued and touched by Ayten's plight, Lotte brings her home to stay in her mother's tidy bungalow. The mother, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), is a quiet, conservative divorcée whose patience is sorely tested by the arrival of this brash, radical foreigner. Roughly when it becomes apparent that political idealism is not the only thing that attracts Lotte to Ayten, their sketchy ambitions begin to unravel and relationships of all kinds are put to the test.

Three sets of parents and children: two mothers, two daughters, one father, one son. Each set is afflicted with tribulations that rend them apart, some deeply personal and some agonizingly beyond their power to control. How The Edge of Heaven approaches these characters, and the places it eventually takes them, is what makes the film such a marvelously humane achievement. Each of the six principals is conventional in their way, even tiresome. Yet each brims with unexpected and obscured qualities, some deeply touching and others disturbing. Akin's storytelling has a determined gradualism, one that eschews sudden revelatory jolts for an intensifying awareness of each character's motives and essence. This graceful approach ensures that the plot's abundant reversals and serendipities rarely appear dubious. Akin's aims are denser and more sobering than facile "We Are All Connected" platitudes. In a lesser film, the threads that link the film's German and Turkish locales would merely be the components of a gaudy cat's-cradle, a magic trick sans purpose. Here they serve as a means to tenderly convey the echoes and contrasts in the film's entwined storylines.

There are films where the criss-crossing paths of the characters eventually meet in a rush of revelations. This is not that sort of film. Revealingly, Akin denies the viewer the satisfaction of narrative release as well as a sense of cosmic mercy. He offers moments of tingling anticipation capped only with deflating disappointment. He also plays with cruel, agonizing turns of fate. If only Ayten hadn't dropped her cell phone; if only Nejat had left the sign on the bulletin board; if only Lotte had turned left instead of right. If only, if only, if only... Akin warmly but firmly urges us to let go of our instinct to game the past or second-guess what is beyond our control. The thematic currents that coarse through The Edge of Heaven are multitude, but the film-maker's essential message is unambiguous: forgiveness and compassion are the paths to liberation, whether from shame, hatred, or grief.

The actors all deliver captivating portrayals, particularly Yesilçay and Schygulla, who coax tremendous pathos from characters that are fundamentally unpleasant in some respects. Schygulla, a frequent collaborator with the late German director Werner Fassbinder, claims the film's most stunningly memorable role. Her plump hausfrau journeys through comfort, bitterness, agony, and eventually to a kind of peace, leading us every step of the way. Equally triumphant is the film's music, an energetic score featuring DJ Shantel's Balkan gypsy beats and the late Turkish folk-rock singer Kâzım Koyuncu. The lush vocals and rhythms splendidly evoke the film's aura of Old World heartache and hope. That same mood is embodied in the film's final, iconic image. Nejat sits passively on a Black Sea beach, waiting for his father to return from a fishing trip, savoring the expectation of a reunion that rage and stubbornness have averted for too long. Human drama simply doesn't come much better than this.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Spanish Fly

2008 // USA - Spain // Woody Allen // August 26, 2008 // Theatrical Print

C - I've kept my distance from Woody Allen's output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can't comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen's earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film's amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson's assets, or Javier Bardem's for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it's a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Johansson) are ridiculously mismatched best friends—the former uptight, the latter flighty; guess which one is blond?—who embark on the sort of luxurious European summer that only seems possible in the movies. Expatriate family friends have agreed to host the women at their estate in Barcelona, while Vicky allegedly studies Catalan culture. The summer promises a turning point for both women, but for different reasons. Cristina is disillusioned with her nascent film career, having wrote, directed and starred in a short feature that she instantly loathed. Vicky is engaged to a reliable, desperately boring Manhattan money man. Cristina is forthright about her longing for something more in life, artistically and romantically, while Vicky denies her creeping sensation of entrapment.

Into their lives ambles Juan Antonio (Bardem), an abstract painter with a smooth and devilishly confident manner. He approaches the pair one night and proposes that the three of them fly to a city whose sculpture he admires, where they will soak in the sights, drink wine, and make love. Asks a flabbergasted Vicky, "Who's going to make love?" "Hopefully, the three of us," Juan Antonio replies matter-of-factly. The pleasure of this scene and its familiar yet marvelously sensual dynamic—Juan Antonio's frankness, Christina's acquiescence, Vicky's resistance—is almost worth the price of admission all on its own.

It wouldn't be much of a film if the women snubbed Juan Antonio, and they eventually agree to his proposal (at least the sightseeing part). Given that they've already seduced him with their beauty and Yankee brashness, he sets about seducing them, but in differing ways and with varying results. Following their weekend getaway, Antonio eventually ushers Cristina more fully into his world of bohemian culture and zesty pleasure. Vicky is visibly disappointed in his choice, but stays silent. Her confusion about her longings and her plans is heightened when her fiancé joins her in Barcelona for a quickie wedding. Cristina, meanwhile, must negotiate more uncanny emotional obstacles when Juan Antonio's volatile and suicidal ex-wife Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz) appears. Much to Christina's initial disbelief, he extends Maria Elena a sympathetic hand, taking her into his home without question. Juan Antonio asks his lover for patience and his ex-wife for courtesy. (Thinking of Cristina's peace of mind, he pleads with Maria Elena repeatedly: "In this house, you speak English.") Maria Elena is the vision of a nightmare ex: explosive, accusatory, venomous, invasive. Oh, and she stabbed Juan Antonio once. Yet Juan Antonio still loves her, a fact that is obvious to anyone who observes them viciously quarrel. The pair are perfect for each other, and also a catastrophe waiting to happen. Juan Antonio speculates that Cristina may provide the "missing ingredient" that the relationship needs. Is this the sublime love that Cristina imagined for herself: sharing a house as one corner of a triangle?

The film's most baffling and unsteady stylistic choice is the weirdly jaunty narration by Christopher Evan Welch. Lacking the anecdotal tone of Allen's own wry voice-over work in his previous films, such as Radio Days, Welch's narration is both ridiculously redundant—"They drank wine at a little café": Hey, they're drinking wine at a little café!—and suggestive of lazy cinematic storytelling. Do we really need someone to tell us that Vicky is regretful, when Rebecca Hall can, you know, show us by acting? That said, the move isn't an outright fiasco. The voice-over is appropriate for the film's narrative, which follows the tracings of many a pulp Mediterranean romance, with its supremely functional prose and preference for visualization over poetry. Whatever coy (or is it ironic?) point Allen may have intended, however, the device is ultimately a wash at best. It's exasperating to be pummeled over the head in such a manner, particularly by a veteran film-maker whose thematic ambitions are otherwise relatively gentle.

Indeed, nothing truly momentous actually happens in VCB. Despite the sex, secrets, and threats of violence, its conflicts are essentially personal. The story is not really about who sleeps with whom, but how both Vicky and Cristina stumble towards revelations concerning their needs and wants. Viewers who need more to sink their teeth into may walk away feeling a little cheated. I was befuddled and charmed, despite my misgivings. There is a good-natured emotional voyeurism in Allen's gaze. The film revels, sweetly and humanely, in the slow, bloody process by which people grow to understand themselves and make critical personal decisions. VCB uncontroversially posits that fresh locales permit us to reassess our assumptions about our lives, and it then has a supremely pleasurable time watching two women undertake such a reassessment.

Did I mention that this film is damn sexy? There's a simplicity to its eroticism, despite the distracting detour to admirably, clumsily scorn bourgeois revulsion for casual screwing and polyamory. Allen shies away from crudeness or silly innuendo, keeping the film's sensuality direct and shimmering. The approach is elementary: show beautiful people enjoying themselves in beautiful places, and the rest will take care of itself. There are no sexual twists in VCB that come out of the blue. The possibilities for delight, the film insists, are always clear and tempting, not to mention diverse in quality and kind. Crucially, each of the principals radiate a distinct erotic vibe: Johannson ripe, Hall flip, Bardem pleading, and Cruz a delectable fusion of fearless, wounded, and demented. The way the actors move and look at one another is arguably more stimulating than the dialog. VCB's sensuality lies in gestures, sighs, the flicking of eyes, and the touching of clothing and wine glasses.

It's fortunate that the spaces between the dialog are entrancing, given that the script often hammers its points with stupid abandon. VCB's characters have an odd proclivity for blurting whatever obvious little thoughts pop into their heads, no matter how ridiculous they might sound when given voice. The performers do their best, but their words often sound less like a finished script and more like frank declarations of character motivation and bias. Never mind. No one ever said that pornography had to be well-written. And, fundamentally, that's what Vicky Cristina Barcelona is: luscious, romantic, PG-13 art-house pornography, tamed with a splash of sadness. Just the sort of film to enjoy with someone you love, or at least someone you want to make love to.

Boy A

Some Kind of Monster

2007 // UK // John Crowley // August 23, 2008 // Theatrical Print

B - Equipped with a disarming candor and despairing gaze, Boy A poses a daunting question: Is it just when society prolongs a criminal's punishment beyond his legal sentence? It gives animation to this thorny dilemma in the person of "Jack," a parolee who committed a horrific crime as a boy, a deed barely reconcilable with his shy, eager-to-please manner. With his sheepish, adolescent grin and wounded brown eyes, Jack (Andrew Garfield) initially seems prepackaged to tug at viewer sympathies and highlight the cruel manner in which ex-convicts are shunned and harassed by free society. However, director John Crowley takes a nervy approach with Boy A, gradually revealing contradictions and unsettling currents in Jack's personality and his past, even as he squeezes him between the dooms of public exposure and a violent death. An artistic and thematic inversion of Gus Van Sant's more daring, heady Paranoid Park, Crowley's feature traces a path trod by numerous socially conscious dramas about evil deeds and redemption, but it does so with a persuasive, moving tone of anguish and entropy.

"Jack" is the new alias of Eric, a notorious juvenile murderer who has been released from prison after fourteen years. His only friend is his genial parole officer, Terry (fierce, essential Scotsman Peter Mullan), who sees Jack as a surrogate son and an opportunity to create a success story. Terry shepherds Jack into the waiting jaws of the outside world, renting him a room and securing him a warehouse job, all the while emphasizing the need for secrecy. It's for his own safety. At trial, the prosecution described ten-year-old Jack as the embodiment of evil, and people are still howling for his blood. As he attempts to adjust to a society that reviles him, flashbacks reveal more of Jack's home and school life, his childhood friendship with his co-defendant, Philip, and what exactly the pair did that cast them as Public Enemy Numbers One and Two. Early in the film, we learn that Philip is dead by the time of Jack's release. Suicide, supposedly, but Jack's fears whisper otherwise.

Things seem to go well for a while. Jack's endearing Nice Guy vibe overcomes his shyness, and he makes friends among his co-workers. Michelle (Katie Lyons), one of his employer's secretaries, asks him out. In spite of some stumbles, the two begin a relationship that Crowley sketches with uncommon realism and warmth. Eventually, however, the artifice of Jack's new persona begins to fray at the edges. He has blind spots in his understanding of other people, as well as a tendency for outbursts of stammering emotion and disturbing violence. Then an unthinking act of heroism garners Jack a dangerous degree of publicity, and his situation goes from anxious to precarious. Much as his crime races to catch up with him, the flashbacks trespass on his reveries and nightmares with growing frequency and clarity: confrontations with school bullies, secret confessions with Philip, and a bloody eel on a gravel riverbank.

Boy A mines the concept of juvenile accountability with sharper focus and a more personalized sense of panicky free-fall than last year's Atonement. The flashbacks reveal secrets that, while not exactly mitigating, throw Jack's heinous crime into a new light. He and Philip were undoubtedly maladjusted, bloodthirsty little bastards, but were they inhuman monsters? And is Jack still a monster? Should one terrible childhood deed mark him forever, like some modern Cain? Crowley approaches Boy A as a straightforward tale of doom: Jack thinks he can outrun the past, but, alas, he cannot. The film is nicely assembled from this perspective, with a gratifying shot of rattling desperation. Garfield deserves a share of the praise for this tone, for while his early gawkiness seems too deliberate, he soon hits his stride. He lends heft and heartbreak to the portrayal, sharply conveying a man whose life is coming apart at the seams. Just as memorable and pivotal is Lyons, who delivers an unexpectedly engaging and complete character that shatters the confines of the usual conflicted girlfriend role.

Crowley relies on tight close-ups and a drifting, jiggling camera to convey a sense of urgency and disintegration. Such methods serve their purpose well in Boy A, although their prevalence lends an overcooked whiff to the proceedings. Likewise, the non-intuitive editing sometimes overstates the jumbled, jigsaw quality to Jack's post-release tribulations. Thankfully, Crowley weaves enough thematic threads into this gray, grave tale that it soars beyond its simple trajectory and occasionally self-conscious artiness. Boy A examines not only the the nature of accountability, but also the cruelties of sensational journalism, media celebrity, and the surveillance state. It finds time to point a finger at vigilantism, child neglect, classist humiliation, and the shamed silence so often erected around sexual abuse. It's a testament to Crowley's nimble hand that these disparate criticisms never feel affected or shoehorned, even as he maintains the film's focus on its primary theme: Is our civilization one that is even capable of extending genuine second chances? And if, so to who? The timelessness--and vexing persistence--of these questions makes Boy A a worthy endeavor, a post-Crime and Punishment for an era of anxious child psychology, correctional systems at critical mass, and spooky nature-or-nurture ruminations.